THE WAR CRIMINALS AFTER THE WAR

In the end all the war criminals had their day in court. In a quiet chamber built from silver birch a sombre council took notes as ten thousand blood-clogged hours of accounts were relayed of murders upon murders, charcoaled flesh, gravelled bones, sucking wounds and bloody vomit, dust and rock, fire and broken glass, gas and plastic and asbestos and concrete blasted into the air, all the sadness of human history recapped in a single titanic effort of cruelty. The war criminals watched the geese on the lawn as their sentences were delivered. Life in prison. Life in prison. Life in prison. Life in prison. Life in prison. Life in prison. Life in prison. And so on. And then the war criminals traded their suits for starchy prison outfits and were led to their cells to lie on their bunks and stare at the ceiling. But guess what happened next? An assassin slipped into the prison. The assassin went from cell to cell, and they tortured the war criminals - to death! When the war criminals were found the next mornings their dead faces were contorted with fear and pain. So contorted were their faces that the doctors agreed that they must have experienced more pain than the human mind could tolerate, which is to say that it was the excruciating and unrelenting suffering itself that killed them, rather than physical trauma, and that in fact their corpses were otherwise healthy. Healthy and dead. There were so many war criminals that it took some time for them all to die, and even though they were moved around, and placed under security which became tighter and tighter, more locks and more guards, tinier boxes, they eventually were all tortured until they died. And of course before they died they feared the assassin, which was a torture of its own. And when they were all dead the spell was finally broken, and then the world returned to normal.